#270726 - 27/11/2005 21:54
Google search "failure"
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journeyman
Registered: 17/05/2000
Posts: 92
Loc: 's-Hertogenbosch; the Netherla...
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Do a Google search just on the word "failure" and then hit the "I'm feeling lucky button"....
What do you get....
works every time...
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#270727 - 28/11/2005 00:29
Re: Google search "failure"
[Re: Cas_O]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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Unsatisfying "official" explanation: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/googlebombing-failure.htmlOr, otherwise translated, Google doesn't like this sort of thing, but they can't be bothered (yet) to throw the engineering resources at differentiating Googlebombing from legitimate link text.
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#270728 - 28/11/2005 01:08
Re: Google search "failure"
[Re: DWallach]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14484
Loc: Canada
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Quote:
they can't be bothered (yet) to throw the engineering resources at differentiating Googlebombing from legitimate link text.
I just don't see a problem here.
-ml
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#270729 - 28/11/2005 01:16
Re: Google search "failure"
[Re: DWallach]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 12/02/2002
Posts: 2298
Loc: Berkeley, California
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Quote:
but they can't be bothered (yet) to throw the engineering resources at differentiating Googlebombing from legitimate link text.
I personally wonder why google isn't throwing resources at their search engine in general. It used to be that I would count on google to find what I was looking for in the first three results. Now the results are filled with link farms. Any search with the word "review" leads to an epinions page with no reviews, and half of any froogle search results are just links to ebay auctions.
Matthew
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#270730 - 28/11/2005 01:52
Re: Google search "failure"
[Re: matthew_k]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 20/01/2002
Posts: 2085
Loc: New Orleans, LA
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Agreed... I am starting to get more and more irritated with these link-sites. One would think that Google had a vested interest in blocking this sort of thing. It is starting to grossly skew their statistics.
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#270731 - 28/11/2005 11:55
Re: Google search "failure"
[Re: lectric]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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I know Google has some large number of staff dedicated to search quality, and I know some of those engineers personally. Absolutely none of them will tell me the slightest thing about how and what they're doing. This is particularly amazing given Google's otherwise carefree attitude about disclosing what they're about and what they're doing.
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#270732 - 28/11/2005 12:13
Re: Google search "failure"
[Re: DWallach]
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old hand
Registered: 14/08/2001
Posts: 886
Loc: London, UK
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Maybe it means they aren't doing anything 
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#270733 - 28/11/2005 13:00
Re: Google search "failure"
[Re: DWallach]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 20/01/2002
Posts: 2085
Loc: New Orleans, LA
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Well, I hate to break it to these folks, but they're losing.
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#270734 - 28/11/2005 13:11
Re: Google search "failure"
[Re: lectric]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5914
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
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Quote:
Well, I hate to break it to these folks, but they're losing.
I shudder to imagine it, but perhaps they are in fact winning and it would be far worse without their efforts...
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#270735 - 28/11/2005 13:15
Re: Google search "failure"
[Re: lectric]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Quote:
Well, I hate to break it to these folks, but they're losing.
As evidenced by Google's undeniable stranglehold on the search engine market share, I'd say they're kicking ass and chewing bubblegum. The very thing that brought Google to the top (aside from the minimalist homepage) was the way their search engine brought the most truly relevant results to the top, where competitors like Altavista, Hotbot, Lycos, et. al. didn't do nearly as good of a job (even though they may have indexed as many / more pages.)
There's really no way to completely stop googlebombing, because a computer has no idea where legitimate growth of a search term ends and googlebombing begins. Heuristics can (and are) being applied to block out known link sites, etc. but the example here ("failure" -> GWB) is not just a googlebomb, though it started out as one (the original search term was 'miserable failure" but apparently they've done such a good job that "miserable" is no longer necessary.) At this point, there are so many legitimate sites that have picked this one up that it's everywhere on the web. Sure, they could manually push the ranking of that site down for that search term, but that's a losing battle, and could be viewed as politically motivated / special treatment / whatever.
I've read many articles from site promoters who've grudgingly lauded the brilliance of Google's anti-spam measures. The fact that this massively-popular and pervasive googlebomb can get through doesn't constitute a "loss" if you ask me. They don't have to stop googlebombing, they just have to make it counterproductive / not profitable to googlebomb for fun and profit.
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#270736 - 28/11/2005 14:05
Re: Google search "failure"
[Re: tonyc]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 06/04/2005
Posts: 2026
Loc: Seattle transplant
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So, GWB=failure has become a 'grassroots' googlebombing?
Too bad we don't vote with our searches.
/I feel lucky!
//couldn't be any worse.
///Oh! donuts!
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#270737 - 28/11/2005 16:24
Re: Google search "failure"
[Re: Robotic]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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Quote:
Too bad we don't vote with our searches.
In some sense, you do, particularly if you're using the Google Toolbar. Part of how Google wants to beat link farms and such is to collect lots of data on both what you're searching for and what you ultimately decided was the proper result of your search. In aggregate, that is clearly useful for the quality of the results. The question is how, exactly, they do this and how, exactly, you can train an army of web surfing robots to defeat it...
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#270738 - 28/11/2005 21:50
Re: Google search "failure"
[Re: DWallach]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 20/01/2002
Posts: 2085
Loc: New Orleans, LA
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Gah, you are all, of course, right. They ARE doing a better job than other companies. I just get frustrated when I type an error message in, and spend the next half hour sifting through crap to find something remotely relevant. The problem, of course, isn't google, but rather the link farms. Perhaps google needs a user-input ranking system, so that every time I hit a link-farm page, I can vote against it.
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#270739 - 29/11/2005 00:29
Re: Google search "failure"
[Re: tonyc]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 19/09/2002
Posts: 2494
Loc: East Coast, USA
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Quote:
The very thing that brought Google to the top ... was the way their search engine brought the most truly relevant results to the top
Brought, sadly past tense. I hope andy is right that the current result polution is good compared to what it could be. Are they being crushed by their own popularity, or are they to busy taking over the internet with admittedly excelent service ideas to extend their advertising model?
lectric, thankfully Google Groups has regained its senses (when the old version was removed, its results were terrible for a while). For computing error messages, Google Groups is beyond phenominal. And you can avoid "for sale" and "shareware" posts using group-specific searches WITH wildcards!
matthew_k, sad but true that Google is useless for consumer product information anymore. I've long since given up on consumer product anything on Google Web, relying on sites I found in the good old days (dpreview.com, etc).
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